A decade of awesomeness…Happy Birthday!
Every day I use to watch at least 1 or 2 of my favourite animation bookmarks during dinner. While I randomly happened to click into Burning Safari today I realized that this masterpiece turned 10 this year. The people I met during studies would mostly name either singing princesses/talking animals or VFX dinosaurs/starships as their inspiration. Burning Safari (…along with BLURs full CG operas) is clearly what got me into animation! I vividly remember my first semester at university, when I saw this unapologetically funny, wickedly smart, energetic, forcefull, dynamic rage of brilliance. It was like a POOOYAKA!. It felt like the finest animation craftsmen you could find on student level had said: “Fuckit! We are not on anyones payroll yet, let’s do a friggin’ rollercoaster and blow everything up in the end. Whoever takes us too serious is self to be blamed.” This attitude translates absolutely effortless into great entertainment….maybe its lack of forced depth, finger-wagging moral message or pretentious smartness is even at the heart of why it’s so much fun. Anyways I switched from games to animation in an instant and had a clear vision of what I wanted to achieve during my time at university!
Visual storytelling, that displays perfect craftmanship, in service of unpretentious entertainment and unapologetic fun.
Nothing more and nothing less! Still today Burning Safari feels like the shining opposite to all the pretentious student directors I met during university, ever so concerned with educating the audience alongside entertaining them, deeply worried nobody would realize how smart and innovative they are. Most of them, however, utterly failed entertaining anybody.
10 years of madness, mayhem and miscommunication. Still Champions League!
And while we’re at Gobelins class of 2006, here’s another timeless classic. In ya face!
